Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

I'm gonna say Godot engine. Yeah, I'm seriously, the "game" engine. https://godotengine.org/

I was playing with it last month and whipped up a simple "toy" (calling it a "game" is too much) that lets me fly a little space ship around a little asteroid field. It took about a day to get it working enough to be fun. (I polished it up a little after that, and maybe one day I'll add some actual game play, mine an asteroid, whatever.)

https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/SpaceGame

While I used GDScript there's a node & pipe dataflow visual UI that non-programmers can use to construct "code", so I think it counts as low-code. You can modify your objects to "export" member vars to the UI so you can tweak them with widgets.

If I had to e.g. design and deploy a 3D world for VR users I would seriously consider Godot as a front-end IDE.

(BTW, I also made a fun knock-down-the-tower toy I call Yengapult: https://git.sr.ht/~sforman/Yengapult )

For 2D games (and some simple 3D) GameMaker Studio[0] is amazing too. It has a “Drag and Drop” mode which allows you to build entire games ready to publish. You can even switch to the code mode if you want to, as each piece of the drag and drop interface directly correlates to a chunk of code.

I’ve made a complete platformer game with my kid with the drag and drop mode in a weekend (5 levels, high score system, power ups, custom animations, the works) then exported it as a proper Windows installable game.

[0] https://www.yoyogames.com/

Yeah i'd also go with unity as a 'low-code'-tool -- not just for the visual-scripting part, but also for the ability to easily add custom editor-tools for every workflow there is and therefore adding just more "low-code"-Tools to the game. We have about 100 custom tools in our studio -- often not more than a few lines of code, but our level-designers can script their own behaviors on top of that. I'm still waiting for an open source tool (not even focused on games) that incorporates code, data and ui this beautifully^^.

(Godot has the same basic principles but w/o the indefinite power of c# as modern and widely used programming language)

I think most modern game engines have visual coding now. Unreal has Blueprints out of the box, and Unity has Playmaker as de-facto standard.

Side note: a very simple 2D game building system with Lua:

https://love2d.org/ - LÖVE is an awesome framework for building 2d games (and it's cross platform!).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com